


Insanity is Only an Illusion

by Eunoia2140



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: Gen, Harry Osborn (TASM2), Jonathan Crane (Batman Movies -Nolan), Mild Angst, Post-TASM2, Post-The Dark Knight Rises, Psychopaths having an intellectual conversation, aka Harry and Crane are cell-mates in jail, crossover marvel/dc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 08:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1738679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eunoia2140/pseuds/Eunoia2140
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day Harry Osborn met Jonathan Crane was the day that chaos was born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insanity is Only an Illusion

**Author's Note:**

> Insanity
> 
> /inˈsanitē/
> 
> the state of being seriously mentally ill

On the island of Manhattan in New York City there sat a small jail that went unnoticed by most people. Its red-bricked front faced the East River, and the whole building took up about half the block. The jail was called Westward Short and held only a select amount of prisoners. Westward Short was a temporary jail, built mostly as a pit stop of some sort for the criminals and, occasionally, the criminally insane. The first part of its name came from a retired psychologist whose last name was Westward, and the second part was decided when the architects who built the place told the ex-psychologist that it was only to be used as a temporary jail.

How terribly _boring_ , Harry Osborn thought as he was pulled roughly down a cinderblock walled corridor.

Instead, out loud he commented, "The place could use a few touchups," to no one in particular. The only other person to hear him was the guard who had one hand wrapped around Harry's handcuffed wrist and the other hovering over the gun in its holster on his hip.

The guard huffed. "The place was built for scumbags. I highly doubt the architects designed it to comfort the inmates."

Harry felt anger bubble in his stomach at the ego-deflating statement and scoffed at the cliché insult. "I am not a scumbag. I’m well educated and intelligent."

They turned down another corridor and passed a police officer who nodded at the guard and then glared at Harry. Harry replied by giving the officer a poisonously polite smile.

The guard jerked Harry away from the cop. "If you're so well educated and intelligent, then why a you here?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Because I attempted to help someone and tried to claim what was rightfully mine."

The guard shoved Harry through a doorway and into a cell. "Exactly."

There were a few _beeps_ and a loud _click_ as the guard shut the large metal door and locked it with numerous automatic locks.

Harry observed the room. There was a cot pushed up again the wall to his left and a table with two chairs on either side of it in the middle of the room. The walls, floor, ceiling, table, and chairs were all made of metal, he noted. The corners of the cell were covered with shadows while the rest of it was illuminated by dull sunlight that streamed in through the thick-glassed window that sat high on the wall across from the door.

Harry shoved his hands in his orange pockets –because the police had made sure not to spare him the embarrassment of having to wear one of the typical, hideous criminal jumpsuits– and spun until he stood by one of the chairs. Glancing at the shadowed left corner of the cell, he pulled out the chair and took a seat. He folded his hands on the cold tabletop and sat up as straight as if someone had rammed a rod down his back, making himself look professional.

(Posture, his father had once hissed at him during Harry’s first press conference, is _everything_.)

"I think that if we're going to be cell-mates, even if it's only for a short amount of time, we should at least tell each other our names, don't you?" he asked the shadow.

An agreeable sigh came from the corner and out walked a man with dark brown, well-combed hair, a pale angular face, and bright blue eyes that reminded Harry of his own. The man sauntered over to the table and pulled out the empty chair, making sure that it scraped against the metal floor before sitting on it. He stretched his long legs and mirrored Harry's businesslike posture.

"Yes, I think that's a good idea," he purred.

Harry extended a hand. "Harry Osborn. Head of OsCorp Industries." He decided to leave the ‘former’ part out of his title.

The man shook Harry's hand. "Never heard of it."

Harry retracted his hand and scoffed. This man was immediately starting to get on Harry's nerves, what with the irritating air of superiority his cell-mate had, as if he was trying to intimidate Harry. It reminded the young man far too much of his father.

"Doctor Jonathan Crane," the man continued, as if Harry had not acted disgusted. He added, "Oh.  _OsCorp._ I remember it now. I believe that Wayne Industries tried to get involved with a project with it, but OsCorp turned it down."

Harry knit his brows. He recalled reading somewhere in OsCorp's files about the failed multi-company project that occurred a few years ago . . .

Crane cracked his knuckles idly, swinging his feet simultaneously under the table. "So why would a well-educated and intelligent young man like yourself be in a place like this?" He motioned to the desolate cell, the large door, the thick-glassed window.

Harry glared at the smirk on Crane's face. "You heard me talking to the guard outside."

"You learn to pick up a sharp sense of hearing when you move from jail to institute to jail to institute to jail . . ." Crane trailed off, eyes sliding off of his cell-mate to stare distantly at the wall opposite him. He muttered for a handful of minutes a bunch of nonsense before he came back to reality with a blink. "Where was I? Ah, right: why are you here?"

"Spider-Man," Harry answered.

Crane started in his seat. "Excuse me?"

Harry eyed Crane warily. "Spider-Man," he repeated.

Jonathan had not stuck Harry as crazy at first, but Osborn was starting to get the vibe by looking at the deranged look Crane suddenly had in his eyes.

"Sorry." Crane ran a hand through his hair, ruffling the front so it looked mildly wild. "It's just, Gotham has a –a Batman."

Harry's eyes widened. "Batman . . . ?"

Crane gave him a strange warning look, making Harry cringe on the inside a bit. The disturbed look on Jonathan's face, his disheveled hair –it made him look like a madman. His blue eyes pierced through Harry's skull, and suddenly the boy had a headache.

"The Batman," Crane said. "Also the bane of my existence. He goes around Gotham at night, fighting crime and protecting the city's brutally ungrateful citizens –saving the corrupt city from itself, as Commissioner Gordon says; he's an idiot of a cop, by the way. He wears this black body suit which acts as armor and hides weapons and even has a cape that makes him look like a bat." He smiled and let out a harsh bark of laughter.

Harry felt a smile split his face, too. "I think New York City's Spider-Man is a lot like Gotham's Batman. Spider-Man is this guy –his name's Peter Parker, around my age, a bastard– and he wears red and blue spandex. He was bit by this genetically altered spider when he snuck into a restricted section in OsCorp's headquarters and got these spider powers that he uses to swing through the city and climb buildings . . . People say he's a hero, but the only thing heroic I've ever seen him do is stop a man-lizard from turning the rest of the city into reptiles." He copied Crane's bark of laughter.

Crane looked at Harry blankly when he stopped talking, and then covered up his mouth with his hand and _giggled_. The sound struck Harry as girlish at first, but the boy soon found himself giggling as well. The pair of criminals both sat at the table, clutching their stomachs as they fell into fits of deranged giggles.

"Spandex?" Crane managed.

"Red and blue," Harry gasped.

It took them both a while to compose themselves, but they managed.

Harry felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if someone had just gotten his hopes of something let down. He rubbed his fingertips together, thinking about the venom running through his veins. It was no doubt affecting his thoughts which was why he felt suddenly light-headed and giddy.

Crane cleared his throat, still grinning somewhat psychotically. "But you didn't really answer my question. What does Spider-Man have to do with you being tossed into this runt of a jail?"

Harry sighed, his smile disappearing as fast as it came, and gazed at the window on the wall. 

"Spider-Man was an . . . old friend, you could say. I asked him for a favor, he refused, and, well –here I am."

Even without Crane's skeptic look, Harry felt that his 'story' did him no justice. The glint in the blue eyes that were boring into him demanded a better explanation, an actual reason for being stuffed into jail. This man, whoever he really was, was extremely curious about Harry; and Osborn was sure that he would keep poking and prodding until he got his way.

"I was dying," Harry began again, "of some rare disease that was in my blood, and I heard that Spider-Man's blood could have the possibility of saving me so I asked him for it."

He remembered asking Peter first to find Spider-Man, asking him for his blood. He remembered Peter refusing which confused Harry because Peter was his _friend,_ so why was he turning down the opportunity to save Harry's life? Then he had been surprised when Spider-Man had come to him himself and flat out refused to give Harry his blood, too. There was not an inch of space in the main office of OsCorp that day that was not littered with broken furniture, ripped papers, or broken glass.

"He said 'no,' of course, so I had to find my own means of procuring the blood."

Unwanted emotions suddenly started churning around in his stomach: grief at the remembrance of being so close to death, anger at Peter for refusing to give him the transfusion, something very delicate snapping in his mind when Spider-Man in the flesh refused to give him the transfusion. All Harry wanted to do was to live. He had wanted to fix the wrongs that his cruel father had done to OsCorp; had wanted to see the world without feeling the constant pressure from his father's ever-intense gaze even from across the country; had just yearned to be loved the right way, to be told that he was not a failure. It hurt too much to cope with the loss at another chance at life and the fact that Spider-Man was responsible for it. The masked hero was supposed to _save_  people, not give them a death sentence.

All turbulent feelings aside, he continued on in a gravelly voice.

"I used a guy named Max to help me get into OsCorp since I was  _fired_ by my own people. Max worked for me before he got into a freak accident on the job and suddenly had the power to control electricity–"

The other man held up a hand. "Hold on. Did you say that this 'Max' could control electricity?"

A nod accompanied by a slightly shaky smile. "It was freaky."

Crane nodded slowly, a slightly impressed expression settling on his face. "Interesting . . . Go on."

"I managed to find the spider venom and injected myself with it, but it didn't help me like I thought it would. It started to transform me into a monster. It was killing me. I got ahold of a final-stage prototype of the OsCorpExo-suit which saved my life. I had no idea when I injected myself with the venom that it would do that to me or that it would make me go . . ." He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence.

"The monster look passes from time to time, so I doubt you'll see me like that," he continued after a while. "Anyway, since the venom made me a little–" he twirled a forefinger near his temple "–the only thing I could comprehend was that Spider-Man had refused to give me the thing which had just saved me from dying, so I went to find him. Have you seen the clock tower at the edge of the island?"

Crane moved his head in a circle, not seemingly able to decide if he did or didn't know the tower.

Osborn clenched his teeth, frustration slowly igniting his blood. "Well there's a clock tower that sits on the edge of Manhattan, and that's where I found a very alive Spider-Man and a very dead Max. What else could I do but try to kill the 'hero' that ruined my life? I didn't; however, I did successfully kill his girlfriend."

Harry felt his heart sink a little at that. Since he had a lot of time on his hands now, his mind being a little bit clearer than it was on the clock tower, he thought a lot about Gwen Stacy. She was a nice girl –at least she was from what he could remember from their short conversation on the elevator in OsCorp's headquarters a few months ago. He felt something always pulling at the back of his brain, something that made his heart heavy and his nightmares bitter. It was guilt, he knew, even though he refused to admit it.

Thinking about that fateful night hurt Harry's head too much, so he often tried not to.

There was a heavy silence in the room as Harry's bitter words sunk in. They hung in the air, leaving a metallic taste in his mouth –or was he imagining that? It was probably just that damned venom swirling back into his bloodstream again.

Jonathan was staring at him with calculating eyes, lips pressed into a line, brows drawn. His long fingers twitched on the tabletop, and then started to trace nonsense patterns on it.

Harry pressed his fingers to his head, feeling it throb uncomfortably under the pressure.

"So now you know my story. What's yours?"

Crane's fingers sped up drawing the patterns on the table –not patterns, Harry realized; _letters_ and _numbers_.

After tapping his forefinger on the metal –a period to end a sentence, Harry surmised– Crane said, "Nothing."

"Oh, come on," Harry insisted with a deceivingly light smile, "You have to have a story."

Jonathan stared at Harry still with those bright blue eyes, calculating, calculating, the gears in his head whirring and humming as they worked to analyze something unknown to Harry.

"I'm just a psychiatrist from Gotham city, trying to explore the human brain," he said simply. Then he added, "Gotham, if you didn't know, is the city that sits on the island right next to–"

"I know where Gotham City is," Harry snapped, a sudden shock of anger warming his body. He was surprised by his newly developed short-temper, and he had to remind himself that he had to spend the time rediscovering himself mentally due to the venom's after-affects.

A smirk crept onto Crane's lips. "Just as I expected," he murmured, continuing to stare at Harry.

Harry shifted, now very, very uncomfortable under his cell-mate's intense gaze.

"Dude, why are you staring at me?" he demanded. At the nonplussed look on Crane's face, Harry shook his head. "Why are you staring at me?" he corrected himself. He sometimes found himself slipping back into using the slang terms he had used with Peter for a while, but always corrected himself because that was 'childish and unnecessary' as his father often used to say.

"I'm doing my job," Crane replied. He spread his hands on the table, palms up. "I told you, I'm a psychiatrist, so it's my job to observe people's actions and thoughts in order to diagnose them with a problem. Would you like to know my diagnosis for you?"

Honestly, Harry didn't want to hear it. Crane was obviously not in his right mind and Harry doubted that the man could still legally be a psychiatrist. But at the same time of his doubts, Harry was slightly amused.

"Sure," he shrugged.

"I think," Crane began, sounding as if he said this a thousand times a day, "that since you were neglected as a child, you've developed depression as well as a form of narcissistic personality disorder. Your obvious extreme feelings of betrayal are due to your lonely childhood, seeing as the only real attachment you had to anyone your entire life was Peter. Your depression enhanced those feelings and made you believe that you had to live up to your father's legacy, desperate to make yourself known –a figure of pure power, in a way."

Harry couldn't decide whether to scowl at the psychiatrist or sigh. There was a nagging feeling that Crane was telling the truth, and it made Harry's skin itch; only adding onto his short-temper.

"Now the narcissism takes form in your thirst to be known-"

"I didn't want to be _known_ ," Harry snapped, standing suddenly from his seat. His blood ran hot and fast in his veins, his breathing ragged. "I wanted to have a friend. I wanted to be _loved_ and not used like a chess piece in someone's game with Fate. You're a freak, you know that?"

Crane laughed coldly. "I don't think that I'm the freak here, Mr. Osborn."

The boy’s reflection on the table caught his eye. Harry stared down at the blurry image on the table in horror. His teeth had grown into fangs, his lips looked cracked and dried, and the veins in his neck and face stuck out as if they carried black ink through them instead of blood. The parlor of his skin had whitened dramatically, causing blotches to spot his face. His eyes, he could just make out through the blurry reflection, had turned green with little blue lines running parallel with green ones in the whites of them.

"What–?" Harry was speechless. "It doesn't normally– It hasn't . . . done this in a few weeks . . . Why would it–? Now–?"

“If you had let me finish explaining, I would have said that I believed, from what you told me and from what I could read from you, that this, uh, monstrous form you take on from time to time is triggered by your anger. You said the first time it happened was right after you injected yourself with the venom, right? And you were very angry then. Think back to all of the other times this has happened to you."

Harry tried to clear his muddled brain, but it was hard to concentrate with the roaring of blood in his ears.

"Try, Mr. Osborn, try," Crane encouraged although his tone was firm and cold, reminding Harry of a certain missing parental figure that died recently.

Harry felt his anger bubble over, felt his mind spin out of control.

"My name is Harry!" he shouted, grabbing the table and flipping it. There was a _clang_ that echoed around the cell as the table hit the floor.

"Mr. Osborn was my father, and I am _not_ like him. I will _never_ be like him. He was the one who did this to me. He was the one who turned me into this –this _monster_.”

This time, Harry threw his chair against the wall.

He stormed over to Crane, towering over him, clawed fingers twitching, itching to be squeezing the life out of the lying psychiatrist. Because Crane was lying wasn't he? He had to be. He _was_.

Crane stared calmly at Harry with those frosty blue eyes, silent as the grave, just staring, calculating, judging.

In the blink of an eye, Harry had Crane pressed against the wall, a hand wrapped around his long throat, his long legs dangling helplessly off the ground. The man's eyes widened but his calm appearance stayed. This only angered Harry more. He crushed Crane's neck between his fingers, the hiss of air coming out of his mouth music to Harry's ears.

"Mr. Osborn–" Jonathan hissed again as Harry's claws dug into his throat. " _Harry_. Calm down. I can –help . . . you. I can–"

"Stop lying," Harry shouted, slamming Crane's head against the wall and making his victim's eyes roll into the back of his head. "Nobody can help me. Spider-Man made that evident enough. I –I don't _need_ help. I need revenge on Spider-Man. I need to kill him." His grip tightened even more, almost completely cutting off the air to his cell-mate's lungs. "It will show my father that I'm not worthless. It'll prove that I'm important and nobody will ever abandon me again because they'll _need_ me. They'll–"

"Harry," Crane choked out weakly, "I _need_ you to put me down."

Tears stung Harry's eyes and he let go of Jonathan who fell to the floor gasping and gently holding his neck.

He felt so unexplainably _angry_.  He was angry at his father for being cold towards him, angry at Peter for not trying to save him, angry at Dr. Crane for making him face the truth, angry at himself for being so angry.

His head started to hurt again.

Turning away from the gasping psychiatrist on the floor, he held his head in his hands, walking over to drag his chair back to where it was and sat in it. There was silence in the cell while Harry managed to cry silently (at what he did not know which only made him angrier and more confused), save for the ragged breathing of Crane.

He ran his hands over his face, slowing his breathing down, and stopping his brain from thinking –thinking about how scared he was of becoming his father, turning into his monster alter-ego permanently, killing another person, dying. . .

“You see, Harry,” Crane wheezed, using the wall to support him as he stood, “I set off your transformation by angering you, proving my theory. First I provoked you to see what would happen, and then I used a more direct target right to the amygdala of your brain. The amygdala is where your fears lay.” He tapped his head and gave an unsettling grin. “I guessed what your most prominent fear was and simply . . . incited it.”

There was a feeling of curiosity tugging at Harry’s mind, distracting him from anything other than talking to Crane. It was a strange feeling that slowly spread throughout his body, as if someone had replaced his blood with lukewarm water. Whatever logic Crane was talking about intrigued Harry in a way that made something inside him scream that it would be useful later in his life.

Crane pulled the short collar of his orange jumpsuit down, turning around to gaze at the blurry reflection of his neck in the metal wall. There were already dark blue and purple bruises forming on the pale expanse of it. He hummed lividly, a dark, raspy sound, and faced Harry again.

“Playing with people’s fears,” he drawled. “It’s what I do. When I was positioned at Arkham Asylum back in Gotham, I was its psychiatrist specializing in psycho-pharmacology. But I, uh, took the liberty of stepping out of my job’s ‘comfort zone’ you could say. I created a fear toxin and experimented on the patients in the Asylum. ”

He locked his icy eyes with Harry’s, offering him a seemingly genuine smile.

“You and me, Harry, we’re not all that different. We’re compelled and intelligent, ruthless and, well–” He shrugged, getting that distant look in his eyes again. “Crazy.”

His smile morphed into a sneer, arrogant and cruel, his eyes gleaming; a true sadist underneath the calm composure.

He’s insane, Harry thought as he ran his hands over his face again, leaning his elbows on his knees. He peered at the floor below him and saw that he looked normal once again. His eyes, he noticed, were still that bright, acidy green, and glared right back at him, daring him to agree with Crane, to admit that he, too, was insane. He was tempted to open his mouth and say yes -submit to whatever mind games Crane was playing with him because this tugging feeling of curiosity, this feeling of sudden doubt that he was sane, was from the doctor showing him what it was really like to be insane.

It had to be.

“No,” Harry growled, glowering at Crane. “We are _nothing_ alike.”

Yet still, even after Harry firmly stated that he and the doctor were nothing alike, there was a voice in the back of his head that insisted that he was lying.

He felt as if he had some sort of split personality –half of his brain urging him to believe that he was still a good person, the other half screaming that he was out of his mind. Surprisingly enough, the first voice sounded an awful lot like Peter’s where the second one sounded like his father’s.

Crane stormed over to where Harry sat, leaning down so that their faces were only inches away. He was shivering violently even though the room was warm and his forehead was glistening with sweat. Some sickeningly sweet smell assaulted Harry’s senses and he coughed, wrinkling his nose at the smell and trying to prevent himself from gagging on the sharp metallic taste in his mouth.

“Don’t lie to me, Harry,” Jonathan hissed. “Remember, I was trained to observe people in all ways. I’ve seen people crying with joy, breaking with grief, screaming with anger –I’ve seen it all. So don’t think for one second that I can’t tell that you’re lying. These illusions that you’ve cast over yourself –these false promises of sanity that you tell yourself– don’t doubt that I cannot see through them because I _can_. Stop _denying_ your fears and _give in_. We all live on fluffy white clouds but fear is the storm that whips everything into a frenzy and sends us falling to our doom. But as you fall, you feel more powerful than ever. And you know what? Sometimes you feel so powerful that you stop falling.”

Listening to Crane’s words had Harry guessing that when he claimed that he ‘stopped falling’ he really was still falling but he was just too insane to realize it.

Crane’s hands suddenly grabbed Harry’s wrists, locking him down in the seat. Harry felt a pang of fear at the psychiatrist’s sudden hostility and mentally scolded himself for it when he saw the other man’s eyes ignite in triumph.

“When you’re insane, everything seems a little more intensely surreal. The colors of the world are black and white but razor sharp. The people around you speak in a language you’ve never heard before and yet you can somehow understand them.

“The mind is a strange place, Harry Osborn, and it’s up to us how we explore and use it,” he murmured.

It took Harry a few seconds to really let the words sink in. At first it’d sounded like Crane had started babbling things, saying whatever came to the front of his mind. Harry was terrified to think that he might turn into Crane if he boiled in his own dark thoughts.  As he listened more carefully, however, he realized that Crane was actually making sense, and he could not help it when a particularly spiteful thought emerged in his tangled thoughts.

“Are you telling me that you’re able to harness insanity?” he asked softly. His gaze burned into Jonathan’s, determined to win something from this disturbing conversation.

A muscle in Crane’s face twitched, and his severe look suddenly lifted when he took a step away from Harry and sighed.

“Yes, I suppose you say that,” he answered, walking around Harry and over to the overturned table.

He bent down, set it back on its legs, and dragged it back to where it originally sat, making sure to let all four feet of it scrape against the metal floor, much like he had with his chair not all that long ago. He pulled his chair upright again and placed it on the other side of the table before sitting down.

“My toxin is a steam-hallucinogen that targets the part of the brain that produces fear. It causes whoever has inhaled it to see something they fear or feared in the past. When I used it on the patients at Arkham, I wore a mask that enhanced the effect of the hallucinogen. Some of the inmates even began to call me ‘Scarecrow’ for it.”

He let out a dark chuckle before continuing.

“I’m happy to give you the toxin for whatever your needs are, but it comes with a price.”

“Whatever you want, it’s done.”

Crane raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Harry nodded. A plan was rolling around inside his skull, new ideas crashing over him like waves on a beach every few seconds.

Crane drummed his fingers against the table for a few minutes and then started to fumble with a loose string on the short sleeve of his jumpsuit.

“Well, for starters I want out of wherever the hell I’m going,” he began thoughtfully. “And then after that I expect–” he paused, looking the boy sitting across from him up and down “–nine grand for a full shipment of the toxin.”

“Fine.”

“It seems as if you’re desperate for my toxin,” Crane observed. “Why?”

Harry let his hands curl into fists and let out a bark of laughter. “Spider-Man, of course. If you give me the toxin then I can use it–”

“–against him,” Crane finished. He leaned back in his seat, still playing with the string on his sleeve. “And once he’s gone insane you can just execute him.”

He suddenly yanked on the string, making it snap.

“Bye-bye Spider-Man,” he murmured.

Harry pressed his lips together and then said, “Yes.”

He tilted his head, keeping his eyes trained on Crane’s long fingers which were _tap, tap, tapping_ again.

“What if I offered you an even better deal,” he said. “What if I could give you something even better than nine grand and a way out of prison?”

Jonathan glanced up at Harry. “Oh?” he repeated. The almost bored reaction made Harry’s heart sink.

“Become an ally of mine. I can get you a job at OsCorp right next to me. You’ll have more money than you can think of and be able to do whatever you want with it. OsCorp has every scientific instrument imaginable –we can get our hands on anything you’d need. Nobody would know you, and the people who do . . . well . . . we can take care of them.”

There was a moment of silence as Crane considered Harry’s offer. Then he said:

“Deal.”

They leaned forward to shake on it before sitting back down, letting more silence fill the room. Now that their deal was official, Harry was starting to plan his escape. He doubted that Crane would be moved later than tomorrow afternoon, two mornings later at the latest which gave Harry approximately two days to set the plan in motion, assuming that the police were taking him to another temporary holding jail on the other side of New York for a few days.

The strange heavy-sweet smell drifted through the air again, making Harry swallow hard. It was a strangely familiar smell, a smell that he would catch a lot when he was at the boarding school when he was younger. He would smell it every day on his way to his mathematics class and crinkle his nose because he had smelled it for seven years now and it always made his stomach churn.

“What the hell is that smell?” he demanded, half assuming that Crane wouldn’t know, half hoping that he did.

The other man set his jaw. “It may or may not be the toxin.” He pressed the back of his right hand to his nose and inhaled, an intrigued gleam shining in his eyes. “It’s the flowers . . .”

Disbelief made Harry blink. “The toxin that you poisoned half a city with –the toxin that makes people hallucinate and go insane– is made out of flowers?” he asked flatly.

Crane pursed his lips. “Other things, too, but yes, flowers are involved.” He snickered and then stopped, frowning suddenly. “It’s not funny. It’s quite dangerous, actually.”

“But I wasn’t–”

“I’m officially diagnosing you with insanity,” Crane interrupted, licking his lips.

Harry, who was still trying to comprehend the doctor’s major mood swing, was taken aback. “Why?”

“Anyone who strikes a bargain with a madman is mad himself.”

Harry Osborn’s eyes matched Crane’s, glinting almost psychotically.

“We’re all crazy at the end of the day,” was all he said.

**Author's Note:**

> I saw TASM2 and I came out of the theater thinking 'wow I really enjoyed Harry Osborn's character'. I'd been wanting to write a story with Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow in it for a long time bc i adore Cillian Murphy's portrayal of him, so I thought that a crossover story seemed in order. I had so much fun writing this, and I hope you liked it. :)


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